The Newcomer

Introductions: "Hi, I'm Daniel. Long-time watcher, first-time poster." (posted 7:48 PM)

mothlight · 8:03 PM · 5 likes: Welcome, Daniel! Don't mind marrow, he bites.

cold_open_77 · 8:10 PM · 8 likes: 412 films?? That's a real number. Respect.

Exterminators · 8:31 PM · 402 likes: Welcome. It is rare that someone arrives here and says plainly what he likes. Most of us pretend to be researchers. I would rather have an honest enthusiast than a dishonest scholar. Tell us more about what you watch, and why.

Thursday morning's meeting ran long, and by the forty-minute mark Asher had stopped following it entirely.

The conference room was the small one on the fourth floor, with the window onto the parking structure, and Hargrove was walking the associates through a deposition schedule in his flat dry voice while the pen tapped, tapped, tapped against the table. Asher sat with the yellow legal pad open and his phone held low between his knees, below the edge of the table, in a posture he had perfected over six weeks and believed to be invisible. On the screen the forum glowed in its white letters on black. A new name had appeared at the top of the page, and under it the words Long-time watcher, first-time poster, and he had read the first line of it four times without taking in any of it.

"Mr. Cole."

He looked up. Every head at the table had turned to him.

"Do you have the Brennan exhibits?" said Hargrove.

"I'm cross-referencing them now," said Asher, and slid the phone under the pad without a flicker. "I was pulling the tab for the affidavit."

"On your phone."

"On my..." He hesitated for only a half-second. "I have the index in a document that's easier to read on the phone."

Hargrove looked at him for a long moment. The pen went on tapping. There was a kind of weary patience in his face, like that of a man who has been handed a wet umbrella at a funeral, and who will carry it out of respect for the occasion.

"Put it on the table where I can see it, then," he said. "Since it's so useful."

Nobody laughed this time. That was the worst of it, Asher thought later, with the white heat in his face that he knew so well by now. If they had laughed, he could have told himself that it was spite. As it was, the silence was almost courteous. Dana looked at the window. One of the associates found something to read on the back of his hand. And Asher took the phone out and laid it on the wood in front of him, face down, and for the remaining twenty minutes he felt the thing sitting there like a small hot stone.

When the meeting ended he was the first to leave. He told himself, going down the corridor, that Hargrove was a man of the old school, who did not understand how younger people worked, and that the whole episode was a question of generations.

…

He read Daniel's post at his desk that evening, with the lamp switched on and the cereal bowl pushed to one side.

It was a short introduction, and it was strangely touching. Hi. I'm Daniel. I've been reading here for about a year and I finally made an account. I work nights at a warehouse. I've watched four hundred and twelve films of the kind this place seems to like, and I keep a notebook of them, which I know is a weird thing to admit. I've never seen it for real. I'd just like to say I'm glad this place exists. It's the only place I've found where nobody asks me what's wrong with me.

He had read, in the six weeks since Noah's link, a hundred introductions of the same kind, and most of them were bad. They were written by teenagers, or by men who wanted to sound dangerous. This one was not like that. It was plain and a little awkward, and it did not try to impress, and so Asher's first feeling, alone in his room with the laundromat light on the ceiling, was a mild superiority. The man had no craft. He had put his whole heart in the first paragraph. Anyone could see that he was lonely.

Then he scrolled down to the comments.

There were thirty-one of them. They said Welcome! and 412 is a real number, and Don't mind marrow, he bites, and under them, with a number beside it that Asher had to read twice, was the comment from the white mask. It was longer than any he had seen. It ran to two full paragraphs. It is rare, wrote Exterminators, that someone arrives here and says plainly what he likes. Most of us pretend to be researchers. I would rather have an honest enthusiast than a dishonest scholar. It went on. It said that a notebook was a fine thing to keep, and that a man who kept a record of what moved him was a man who paid attention. It said that nobody in this room would ask Daniel what was wrong with him.

Asher put down the spoon.

He read it again from the top, slowly, and a feeling came over him that he did not like and could not have named, a feeling like standing in a doorway and watching a party in which one has not been asked to dance. The words were kind. They were exactly as kind as the ones that had been addressed to him on the night of the cabin photograph, and warmer, and longer, and he noticed with a small cold shock that he was counting them.

Two lines, he thought. He gave me two lines.

He opened the spreadsheet, and looked at the column headed Likes me, and looked at the date. Then he did something he was a little ashamed of afterward. He clicked on Daniel's name, and looked at the account, and saw that it had been created that morning and had a single post, and he wrote in the Credibility column, beside the new name, the number three.

It gave him no satisfaction at all.

…

At half past nine he wrote a comment of his own.

He did not like to admit that he had been working on it for a quarter of an hour. It was meant to be helpful. He thought, as he typed, that he was doing the newcomer a service, since no one else had had the courage to say it, and so he wrote: Welcome, Daniel. A suggestion. A notebook of 412 titles is a catalogue, not an analysis. If you want to be taken seriously here you should consider moving from what you've watched to what you've concluded. The forum rewards argument over enthusiasm.

He read it over. He added Just a suggestion. He took it off, and then put it back.

He posted it, and went to brush his teeth, and when he came back there was a reply.

Haha, thanks, wrote Daniel. The icon beside it was a small gray silhouette. Are you a lawyer or something? That sounded like a clause in a contract. And below it, in a rush, were four comments with the same laughing face. Contract man, wrote mothlight. "Notwithstanding the foregoing, welcome," wrote cold_open_77, and the little number beside it said that fourteen people had found that funny.

Asher sat very still.

He knew exactly how it felt. It was a feeling as old as grade school, a slow dropping in the belly like an elevator. He told himself that the joke was not at his expense. It was an in-joke, a bit of forum humor, the sort of thing that was said to make a newcomer feel at home, and Daniel had only meant to be warm. He told himself that he did not mind. He told himself that anyone who knew the first thing about legal writing would take it as a compliment, and he shut the laptop, harder than he had intended, and sat for a long time on the edge of the bed in the dark.

After a while he opened it again, and found that the phone on the blanket beside him was lit with a message from Noah, sent privately, outside the group chat, which Noah almost never did.

Saw the Daniel thing, it said. Don't take it personally. They tease everyone.

I'm not taking it personally, typed Asher. It's a fairly obvious bit of forum culture.

Okay. There was a pause, and the little dots came and went and came again, which meant that Noah was composing something and discarding it. You know you don't have to correct people, right? Like, when someone posts a thing about themselves. You can just say hi.

I did say hi. I said welcome.

You said welcome and then you gave him a note.

It was constructive.

I know, wrote Noah. Forget it. Go to sleep.

Asher looked at the screen for a while, with an irritated sense of having been handed something he had not ordered, and decided that Noah was tired, and that it was not worth answering. He turned the phone over on the blanket. Then he picked it up again, and typed Goodnight, because it seemed the polite thing, and Noah sent back a single thumbs-up.

…

It was after eleven when the thread began to move.

He should have been asleep. He lay on his back with the laptop on his stomach and refreshed the page, and he noticed, because he could not help noticing, that the conversation between Daniel and the mask had left the main thread and gone into a corner of its own, where the two of them wrote to each other in short quick lines, and the rest of the room had fallen silent to watch.

You said you had never seen it for real, wrote Exterminators. I want to be sure I understand you.

I haven't, wrote Daniel. I think about it a lot. I don't mean hurting anyone. I mean the other thing. Seeing it done properly, once. I know how that sounds.

It sounds like a person who has been alone with a thought for a long time.

Yeah.

Do you want to see it for real?

Asher's thumb stopped on the screen. He held his breath, a little ridiculously, as though they might hear him. It was so well done. It was better than any of the stories in the room, because it was quiet. Nobody threatened anyone. Nobody said anything that could not have been printed in a newspaper. It was only two people talking at midnight, in low voices, about a thing that did not exist.

Think about it carefully, wrote Exterminators. A wish like that deserves some care.

I've been thinking about it my whole life, Daniel answered.

There was no reply. The little dot beside the white mask went gray, and stayed gray, and the thread ended there.

Asher lay in the dark with the glow of the screen on his chin, and his heart was going hard, and he felt, along with the dull ache of his own small humiliation, a bright and shameful pleasure. It was marvelous. It was the best thing he had read in weeks. He wondered who was writing it, and how they had found the courage to be so patient, and whether the next installment would come tomorrow, and he thought, with the kind of happiness reserved for a man who has found a good book on a long train ride, that it was not a bad time to be alive…